Thomas Lanier Williams III known by his pen name Tennessee Williams was an American playwright. Along with contemporaries Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama. These Tennessee Williams quotes will motivate you.
Best Tennessee Williams Quotes
- “All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “If you can’t be yourself, what’s the point of being anyone else?” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts.” ~ Tennessee Williams
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“Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.” ~ Tennessee Williams
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“To change is to live, to live is to change, and not to change is to die.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “I don’t believe in “original sin.” I don’t believe in “guilt.” I don’t believe in villains or heroes – only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents. This is so simple I’m ashamed to say it, but I’m sure it’s true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that’s why I don’t understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Enthusiasm is the most important thing in life.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a giant question mark that refers to three questions: Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going!” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.” ~ Tennessee Williams
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“If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the on that you love doesn’t love you.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it… Success is shy – it won’t come out while you’re watching.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Luck is believing you’re lucky.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” ~ Tennessee Williams
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“Success and failure are equally disastrous.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” ~ Tennessee Williams
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“We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people?” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Vanity, fear, desire, competition – all such distortions within our own egos – condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Nothing’s more determined than a cat on a hot tin roof.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.” ~ Tennessee Williams
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“Everybody is nothing until you love them.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Talent? What is talent but the ability to get away with something?” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Time doesn’t take away from true friendship, nor does separation.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.” ~ Tennessee Williams
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“In memory everything seems to happen to music.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Men don’t want anything they get too easy. But on the other hand, men lose interest quickly.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour — but a little bit of eternity dropped in your hands — and who knows what to do with it?” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Physical beauty is passing – a transitory possession – but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart – I have all these things – aren’t taken away but grow! Increase with the years!” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behavior.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.” ~ Tennessee Williams
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“Kill off all my demons and my angels might die too.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “I can’t expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “It’s hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don’t want to write.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “I gave up visiting my psychoanalyst because he was meddling too much in my private life.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.” ~ Tennessee Williams
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“To be free is to have achieved your life.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “For time is the longest distance between two places.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “The human heart would never pass the drunk test…. If you took the human heart out of the human body and put a pair of legs on it and told it to walk a straight line, it couldn’t do it.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at – Elysian Fields!” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “The helpless can’t help the helpless.” ~ Tennessee Williams
- “Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable. –Blanche Dubois” ~ Tennessee Williams
